What does this mean? In addition to the fact that this blog has been running more or less nonstop for 13 years, it means that we have outlasted a great many of the bloggers who inspired me to start blogging when the medium was so shiny-new, your average citizen had no idea what a "blog" was.

I know that blogging has lost some of its cachet, but that really doesn't matter. It's fun to be able to read the evolution in my own thinking going back over 13 years. We long ago bid farewell to Deb, whose stout Republicanism began to flirt with authoritarianism, and to Klaus, who for his own personal reasons didn't want to be involved anymore.

That leaves me, your resident lunatic Alois, to carry on.

More than anything else, I believe in FREEDOM. Not in the way that the libertarians/neofascists who call themselves Republicans today believe--that freedom means a large arsenal in every home, seeing "government" as an eternal enemy, and that every man (and woman) must fend for themselves. That's not freedom. That's what we had back in the days when we lived in caves.

If you want to know what "freedom" really looks like, our neighbors to the north have a much better idea. Not that Canada is perfect, but at least they've got the basic idea down. You're not really free when the lunatics at the NRA are dictating national gun policy, too-big-to-fail Wall Street banks are holding the country hostage, and one President's mild attempt to insure that all Americans have access to affordable heathcare is seen as treason committed by a black Marxist communist from Kenya. You can't really reason with these people. You've just got to convince as many people as possible that they're wrong.

This blog was a lot more fun back in the days when we weren't living under the totalitarian regime of Scatt Wanker, überführer of Wisconsin. Perhaps we were spoiled growing up with Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford and Tommy Thompson, reasonable men who actually listened to their constituents. Now more and more of America is run by treasonous scoundrels who seek only to pad their pockets by doing the dirty business of a handful of billionaires. And you might have noted that they all have an "R" after their names, and that for the most part they had their origins in the "Tea Party" movement.

It is my duty as an American to do as much as I can to alert my fellow citizens of the malevolent intentions of this renegade and frankly un-American movement, which is precisely why I have treated Donald Trump with kid gloves (he's clueless on a lot of issues, but he's not going to sell us out to big banks and industry) and why I like Bernie Sanders more than Hillary. I want to see America be great again, not a groveling subsidiary of some very, very evil people and the feebleminded shadow of what used to be our "little brother" to the north.